Seeing is believing as Arsenal thrash Leeds to go seven points clear

Elland Road waited, just a little, for the game to settle before turning to the visiting Arsenal fans and running through a list of all of their fears.

They opened with “second again, olé olé,” before segueing into “you’ll fuck it up”. The set closed with a genuine crowd-pleaser, “all that money and you’ve won fuck all” echoing from all four corners of the stadium.

It was at roughly that point – maybe a minute or so later – that Noni Madueke found himself in a pocket of space out on the right wing, granted enough time to whip in a cross that managed to evade the many and various colossuses crammed into the penalty area and find the head of Martín Zubimendi, who duly gave Arsenal a lead that they never for a second looked like surrendering.

The juxtaposition was striking. Scrutinising the exact lyrics of most chants is not an especially worthwhile pastime – Leeds fans do not, for example, sincerely believe that this edition of their team is the greatest the world has ever seen – but how one crowd chooses to taunt another can still be instructive.

Those aimed at their visitors by the South Stand, home of Elland Road’s most unabashed provocateurs, were designed to punch as many bruises as possible. Arsenal’s fans are haunted not only by recent memories of advantages squandered, opportunities missed, promise unfulfilled, but by the knowledge that this time it really should be different. The pressure of being top might be a privilege, but it is a pressure nonetheless.

It is that which has made Arsenal’s season so far seem so stressful, so fraught. Mikel Arteta’s team started the weekend four points clear of Manchester City and Aston Villa; by the close of play on Saturday, they had extended that lead to seven. Most of their rivals have fallen away. Of the two that remain, only Villa have mustered any sort of momentum.

The sentiments expressed by Elland Road, though, are representative of the broader swathe of public opinion. Arsenal are cast, in the popular imagination, as hanging on by a thread. They are too emotional. They are too reliant on set pieces. They have dropped too many points. They are going to be caught. The crisis is here, the collapse coming, this week or next or the one after that.

That is not to say that there have not been set-backs, of course. Prior to their troubled journey to Yorkshire – the fog too thick at Yeadon International Airport for their plane to land, so Arteta and his players were forced to travel by coach, like peasants – Arsenal had taken two points from their previous three games.

They had failed to score against the teams formerly known as Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, currently sitting 17th. They had been sucker-punched at the Emirates by Michael Carrick’s Manchester United. It would be sophistry to suggest that these were not disappointing results, even in a league now in the grip of viral inconsistency.

It is natural, too, that Arsenal’s fans should be nervous. Title races are stressful, particularly so when every side you face cost hundreds of millions of pounds to build and contains a clutch of internationals in peak condition, when your team has fallen agonisingly short three years in a row, when your club’s wait for a championship has lasted 21 years.

It is understandable that, in their minds, peril lurks around every corner; it is even understandable that, from the outside, every game feels like something of a referendum on their ability to get over the line, to see it through. It is an unavoidable, unsolvable paradox for any team in their position that nobody can be quite sure that you can win until you have already done so.

And yet, the moment Zubimendi scored, it became immediately clear that there is a discrepancy between the nature of Arsenal’s season and the perception of it, a tension between what happens on the pitch every weekend – and occasionally on a Tuesday or a Wednesday – and the discourse that takes hold in the absence of actual football.

Arsenal’s credentials are, in the flesh, unquestionable. Arteta put Martin Ødegaard, his captain, on the bench for this game, a difficult encounter with a team that had lost just once in two months and play in one of the few remaining hostile atmospheres in the Premier League. He lost Bukayo Saka, his prime creative force, to an injury sustained in the warm-up. He, and his team, did not miss a beat.

Madueke stepped in for Saka, Kai Havertz for Ødegaard, and Arsenal looked no less imperious. With his team coasting to victory, he sent on reinforcements of such quality that it felt slightly unfair, like perhaps it might be a good idea for the Premier League to introduce a mercy rule. Struggling against Leandro Trossard and Viktor Gyökeres? Here are Ødegaard, Gabriel Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus and, oh, Eberechi Eze.

When Daniel Farke spent several minutes eulogising his opponents after the game, it did not sound like a defeated manager justifying his own shortcomings. His admiration was meant to be taken seriously and literally. Trying to hurt Arsenal, in his view, seems to be essentially impossible. Whatever Leeds tried, he said, Arteta’s team “always had the answer. Their quality against the ball was of the top level.”

It is tempting, comforting, to attribute that discrepancy to the difference between the digital and the analogue, to suggest that the criticism can be traced to the need to feed the algorithms that govern our lives with the quarrels and the division which sustain them, but it would be false. The online and the real have long since fused together, in football as much as anywhere else.

It is, instead, a wilful suspension of disbelief, a determined attempt to ignore the obvious reality. Arsenal’s fans will doubt until the title is mathematically certain, and that is as it should be. There is absolutely no reason for the rest of us to join them; sometimes, it is easiest just to believe what you can see.

Photograph by David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images